I have a terrible confession to make. You have, of course, heard of people who are color blind. Well, I am taste-in-clothing blind.
This is not genetic. It was acquired. I was the youngest of six kids; we were “socio-economically disadvantaged,” and so I generally had to go to school wearing a pastiche of hand-me-downs and cheap clothes that got holes in them very quickly.
The inevitable teasing and thinly veiled looks of pity and contempt this situation created of course had its effect. I now associate clothes with painful embarrassment. I have difficulty even thinking about clothes shopping, and when I go, I have panic attacks. The clothes I do buy are always very basic blacks and blues, as I have been told that these things “go” with one another. I don’t understand the concept of “matching,” so I just play it super safe. When I buy expensive suits, I hire someone to tell me what to buy.
The way one dresses is fairly important, but I have such a backlog of embarrassment in this realm I have become pretty much non-functional, and I am always looking for someone who can tell me what to buy and wear. I occasionally see something that I like but I won't buy it for fear of it being not a good thing for me to wear. Too much risk of the old embarrassment. Not worth taking the risk of revisiting that.
On the flip side, I escaped a kind of nasty embarrassment that most other people have to go through, and that was, I was always the top student in my class. I never had anxiety about tests or grades, because I never experienced anything other than pretty much perfect scores all day every day. All the other kids, on the other hand, lived in constant fear of being shamed and embarrassed by red x’s on their tests and “f’s” on their report cards, and even if they did reasonably well, they had a constant experience every day of being told they were intellectually “not quite as good” as Justin Locke.
So now, while I can freely approach intellectual challenges with considerable aplomb and even a sense of fun, I can’t help but wonder how once having been under constant fear of grade-based shame and embarrassment has affected the lives of many people. Do they approach creative/ strategic thinking in the same cautious “this is very dangerous” way that I approach clothes shopping? Are they so afraid of looking stupid that they seek the safety of experts, and blindly follow their advice? How many people in your company have chosen the safety of a job requiring mere obedience to authority and culture, and who are endlessly averse to anything slightly new or different? How much potential imagination and creativity has been suppressed and lost forever, just as my ability to pick out a tie is gone for good?
We often talk about all the advantages of “getting an education,” but rarely do I hear anyone discussing these nearly universal down-side-effects, of putting people through an experience where there is an extremely high daily danger of embarrassment for thinking independently or daring to be different.
© Justin Locke
